


Not a Second Thought

by i_can_do_fics



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Archivist Sasha James, Gen, My First AO3 Post, except not really, hello lgbt community, jon is a lightweight but I'm making sasha buff anyway, not!jon, time for sexy archivist huh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:34:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23766985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/i_can_do_fics/pseuds/i_can_do_fics
Summary: Sure, Jon seems a little different after the Prentiss attack, but nothing wrong if people want to change, right?(A little spin on Not-Jonathan Sims from the Archivist Sasha au)
Relationships: Sasha James & Jonathan Sims
Comments: 9
Kudos: 151





	Not a Second Thought

During the Prentiss attack Jon gets separated from Tim in the tunnels after they both lose Martin, and he finds himself back in the Institute.  
In artifact storage. 

He’s not alone. 

After he meets back up with everyone, he’s……not acting quite right. Martin can’t put a finger on HOW, but he concludes WHY is because of this Very stressful encounter with the alleged supernatural firsthand.  
He doesn’t think about it again for a long time. 

Everything’s back to normal, or at least as “normal” as working in the Magnus Institute really can be, but Jon is… different? But not in ways immediately obvious. More…mellow. More keen on making conversation than refusing to shut up about the Leitners. Doesn’t fidget with the stapler anymore. Much more easily pressured to clock out on time instead of staying late. 

Every time Sasha’s mind wanders over to one of these thoughts, she can’t help but dismiss it without a second thought. She’s glad that John’s making healthier decisions since the attack, it had really taken a toll on his physical and mental health more than the others.  
She’s glad that she doesn’t have to worry about him, she tells herself, though there’s something lingering behind that sentence she can’t quite parse. 

A woman had arrived in the Archives, though to provide support for her friend making a statement rather than herself. She had a statement of her own inside her, Sasha had been growing strong enough to… _know_ that, but the woman just didn’t want to give it, was all. Georgie Barker, she said her name was when Sasha asked.  
They got to talking, and both Georgie and her friend Melanie had stayed in touch, being intrigued by the supernatural themselves and apparently what Sasha had to say about it. Georgie had been visiting one time when Sasha noticed she had been looking strangely at someone at the other side of the room. Sasha knew that Georgie and John had been together at one point, and now they weren’t, so her attention slid off of the weird stare Georgie was giving him before she spoke up. 

Why was Jon drinking coffee? 

At Sasha’s confused response, Georgie started listing things that as they were pointed out suddenly became clear they didn’t make sense. Jon hated that sweater vest, he’d always said it was so scratchy he could feel it under his shirt. Jon claimed to like being tidy, but he could never get papers in just the way they were neatly piled on his desk now. Jon wouldn’t be caught DEAD listening to his old Mechanisms songs for fear that someone would see and find out about the band he was part of in college. Georgie _knew_ Jon, why was he acting so differently?  
Somewhere behind Sasha’s eyes begin to hurt.

Sasha’s clever. Of course she’d realize something had been shifting her attention away from the couple of statements she’d dropped three times now, one of them even in the trash. It had taken an ungodly amount of excruciating focus to listen and read through each one of them, one after the other. The house on Hilltop Road. A psychology experiment gone wrong. A student choked by a thick cloud of strings that had pulled them along through living for weeks, and nobody noticed. A tape that had turned on back when Sasha had rushed out of the room to warn Tim of the woman behind him, of Jon confiding in Martin about his encounter with a Leitner when he was a child.

Sasha listened to this one for as long as she could, somehow knowing it to be the last record of Jon she had before… it was the last time she had heard Jon being _scared_ , she realized. The next day, when Sasha looked closely, she could see the faintest of oily threads glinting in the air above John’s hands. 

Jon was being punished for pulling back the curtain, for showing a thread pertaining to him thought to be invisible, even to just one person ~~that he loved~~. 

And she hated it. 

When she’s ready, she sends the rest of the staff home early, and thinks she has John cornered. He’s lying still in the cot in one of the back rooms of the Archives, the one he hadn’t used in so long ever since he had been…”convinced” not to overwork himself, with the lights off. When Sasha calls out to who might be the puppeteer, he's still, curled up so tightly that he felt more like a crumpled sack of….. than a person. When Sasha calls out to Jon, though, he risks a glance over his shoulder toward the door of the room and, seeing a figure there, quickly turns back to the wall, muttering to himself near inaudibly; if he doesn’t move at all, doesn’t struggle, then maybe the Spider watching at the edge of the web he was trapped in wouldn’t notice, and more importantly, he’d know that his inaction was his _own-_

Sasha hears rope and string and thread stretching and tightening from down the hallway, the sounds tying and weaving through each other into a messy tangle. She snaps into focus and is across the room in a second. She hefts up Jon in her arms, much to his (though not disgruntled) bewilderment, and carries him out of the institute as fast as she can, wiping cobwebs stuck in Jon’s hair and clothes away, and pulling apart the now oh-so delicate spiderweb threads attached to his hands, his eyelids, his tongue….

The floor is sticky beneath her feet. 

A few days later, when Sasha was still letting Jon stay at her flat and giving everyone paid leave while the…exterminators? got rid of the spiderwebs and the rest of the unexplained infestation, she invited Tim and Martin to get lunch with them. 

Jon told the three of them how at first, it really didn’t feel like he was being controlled or compelled. When he did something just a touch too out of character, even for him, he felt surprised, but he guessed the attack had changed him a lot more than he thought. 

That is, up until he noticed the strings. 

Before he could properly realize what they even _were_ the strings tightened, thousands of impossibly strong threads constricting around him so tightly he couldn’t move.

Until he did. 

It hadn’t hurt, no.  
But it felt _wrong_ , walking too slowly and standing too straight, words coming out of his mouth so alien it felt like someone else’s, with the bitter taste of bad coffee lingering on his tongue. There was no sign of the strings loosening their suffocating hold, so he became numb, slowly turning complacent that he would never be able to act of his own accord again at the same time as being utterly terrified out of his mind by that very same thought.

As the months went on he felt his identity unravel more and more, all the little subtractions adding up to leave nothing behind; nothing but the secrets he whispered, smiling, to the spiderweb in the corner of his apartment and the courier that waited there in the center, eagerly watching him and listening, ready to report back to Mother at a moment's notice. At times he couldn't help but think back to before he saw the strings and wonder, how long had he not been himself? Did he even remember anything to compare himself to as he is now, a one end of a silky thread in every muscle, every wink of an eye, every heartbeat?  
Something else began to rise up in Jon's chest, however. Jon had lost his tongue to a string ages ago, and when whatever was speaking _did_ talk… they were polite. More considerate to Martin when he slipped up. Friendlier with Tim and easier to laugh with. Jon became all too aware that whatever- whoever he was was taking greater care of himself than he had ever thought to. Maybe- if he ever DID come back- it would just be better to give himself up again, if he did anything himself he’d just ruin everything, he should just _**not-**_

At that point Jon had full collapsed with his head on the table, shaking and sobbing in front of the three of them. Martin had been crying as Jon spoke, and now reached out tentatively to comfort him. Tim was certainly no worse for wear, budding horror in his own eyes and looking completely distraught as he thought about the talks they’d had in the past seven months while someone who was Jon, but somehow so very _not_ Jon had been working with them, and they had just….never noticed. 

With Jon’s permission, Sasha placed the tape recorder on the table in front of them and pressed play. They wordlessly listened to Jon and Martin panicking and hunkering down in the Archives, hiding from the worms, when Jon had told Martin about Mr. Spider; the last time in seven months any of the four of them had heard Jon speaking.

**Author's Note:**

> me writing this contribution for archivist sasha: here's how jonathan sims can still live
> 
> i was thinking our jonny boy has too many... strings attached for the web to give him up to some clown so easily. thought it also might be a BIT more plausible than jon just being trapped in the table if we're letting him live, since it didn't go so well for sasha. i know canon is a sandbox and it's fine if he is just there blahdsgsbdhgsblah but this matters to me so i'll stick by it
> 
> sure, the not-them hurt you, but do they make you watch?


End file.
